The Look Of Love - film review

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Girl power: The Look of Love is a celebration of Soho as well as of permissiveness

Just how much of himself Steve Coogan put into Alan Partridge you can tell by how much Alan Partridge there is in everyone else he plays. Whether Coogan is playing an adjusted version of himself in The Trip or a selfish New York art dealer in What Maisie Knew, you just keep getting pure Alan-isms of gesture and intonation. He can’t help it.

While it’s a triumph to have created such an immortal, it’s also a serious obstacle for him in making any other role plausible — unless, that is, Coogan is able to work our affection for that dreadful yet irresistible archetype into a useful component in a different part. That’s what, with the help of director Michael Winterbottom, he achieves in this biopic of the strip show impresario, pornographer and Soho property baron Paul Raymond.

Alan Partridge, crass, bullying, sexist and inept, is not just tolerable but actually likeable in a perverse way because he never succeeds, except in his own mind. He’s a failure and that makes him endearing as well as repulsive.

As a businessman, Paul Raymond was not a failure. He astutely converted profits made from porn — exploiting women’s bodies and men’s frustrations therefore — into a property empire in Soho that made him at one time Britain’s richest man. Quite possibly, he wasn’t a particularly nice or interesting person. He didn’t treat most of his family (including his wife Jean, played by Anna Friel) well. But The Look of Love begs sympathy for him, not just looking indulgently on the porn and the sleaze, the threesomes and the cocaine, but inviting compassion for his loss of his beloved daughter Debbie to a heroin overdose at the age of 36.

And one reason you become sympathetic to Raymond here is that again and again you glimpse the Partridge in him. Exclaiming over a failed nudie show, he says: “We’ve got dolphins pulling knickers off girls, for goodness sake — what’s not to like?” It’s pure Partridge, as is the sitcom way that every time he offers people champagne, he cautiously specifies afterwards “house champagne”, or when he boasts he’s friendly with the Beatles, he adds “except for Yoko”. His idea of witticism — saying “I’m shaken but not stirred” in a Bondy voice, or cheering “Bottoms up... literally!” — is perfectly Partridgean too.

It all helps to make Raymond funny, harmless and oddly familiar. We first see him in old age returning alone to his flat after the death of his daughter, watching a VHS of her testifying to him as a great father, leading into a quasi-documentary recapitulation of his career, from the first shows in which the women just posed topless and were not allowed to move, to his first private strip clubs and then nudie-enhanced legitimate theatres, once censorship was relaxed.

Moving into porn mags, Raymond says to his prospective business partner, who’s just given him a spiel, “Well, if you can ‘edit’ as well as you ‘talk’, I’m very interested” — again an unmissably Partridgean cadence.

During a cheerful threesome, including his then partner, Fiona Richmond, Raymond says: “I love you — and I like you a lot!” To which the other girl sweetly replies: “I’m glad you guys love each other!”

Though there’s plenty of female nudity in the film — featuring lots of bushy pubic hair to go along with Raymond’s ever-changing sideboards and mullets as a sign of the times — the sexuality is all oddly innocent and chipper. Indeed the movie essentially celebrates permissiveness as well as Soho itself.

It is worth remembering that it was coke and party girls for which Coogan was turned over by the tabloids, resulting in him raging on Newsnight that the News of the World was morally bankrupt, and scoffing, when it was claimed it had done good journalism too, “Hitler was nice to dogs!” in a very familiar tone of voice. The Look of Love is the case for what Soho has to offer.

It is, by the way, another very good piece of fluent, apparently sometimes semi-improvised film-making from the remarkably productive Michael Winterbottom, whose last film, Everyday, was a patient study of the effect on a family over a period of years of the father being imprisoned for drug-dealing. The Look of Love also affirms that it is who you really love that matters. The film accrues real depth of feeling largely because of a great performance by 23-year-old Imogen Poots as Debbie Raymond, her vivacity and vulnerability catching the heart. Winterbottom closes with her in close-up, singing the great torch song of the title — “Now that I have found you, don’t ever go, don’t ever go, I love you so” — and it’s suddenly a film about lost time for every one of us.